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We were in the middle of a congenially post lunch conversation at our annual get together of architect buddies, having demolished the designs of local planning and building efforts moving on to Brexit and independence for Scotland. All was going swimmingly well, when we somehow wandered into global warming and climate change and I foolishly confessed to being a sceptic. The faces froze with an unconcealed shock. Suddenly I was not one of them. When people say “ You are, of course, entitled to your point of view …” You know you have the wrong one. I realised that I had touched on something sacred. Something that was not up for discussion. This was a religious issue and what I had said amounted to blasphemy

I was reminded of this when watching the BBC documentary “Climate Change – the facts” which started with David Attenborough speaking from a field somewhere in England and ended with the school strikers in central London and Greta Thunberg. It was difficult to take any of this seriously. The hurricanes, the droughts the wildfires the dying bats and the deforestation are, without a doubt, desperately serious and devastating events, but it was the seismic jump in thinking, the incredible leap of faith that placed all these events as a direct result of human action, that was breath-taking. There was a small admission that not all can be laid at the foot of human activity but the central message was that they did. I wonder if the BBC team actually chose the title to put down the collection of essays of the same name which challenge the accepted view. There was no debate and no quarter given to sceptics. In fact, their intervention was seen as part of the problem. The sceptics have effectively delayed action.

The message was simple: Extreme weather is increasing, It is a result of global warming which is a result of green house gases, the principal one is CO2 which was due to carbon emissions and for which the human species is culpable. From there, the prediction was for more “extreme weather” with tipping points which will trigger “climate collapse”. Now all of that may be true, although the connections were not always clear, Among the “facts” there was no mention of the sun which has probably the greatest influence on the changes in climate, nor clouds, their cooling effect during the day and milding effect during the night. The forests were described as soaking up the carbon without any mention of the other side.- how the trees actually need CO2 to grow and green the planet. There was no acknowledgement that the predictive models were anything other than fully trustworthy or that past predictions were wrong, some spectacularly so.

I happen to think that the destruction of the planet is a very serious issue and that our careless exploitation of resources is morally corrupt. I believe that humankind has a heavy responsibility to care for the natural world of which we are an intrinsic part. And I know we are not doing that. I take it very seriously and have done so for decades. It was a subject we agonised over as students in the 60’s and early 70’s when pollution was how it was presented. Paul Ehrlih’s “The Population Bomb” was a text that really scared us. What I can’t take seriously is the para-religious dogma that will not allow any discussion, that simplifies a complex subject into soundbites, that are preached in sermons often by people who have actually no special expertise, no qualification or authority in the subject and it doesn’t help the cause. The fact that the celebrity activists play fast and loose with their own carbon footprints doesn’t help either. It is the classic preacher’s sin of not practising what you preach.

But it was not just the sermon – telling us how bad we are and how we are heading for a cataclysmic disaster- It was the belief that we can find our own salvation, was what troubled me most. It is the unconscious arrogance of the thing that lacks any sense of realism. The repeated mantra “We can save the planet” doesn’t bear any scrutiny. It is not true. We can’t. This misplaced confidence hasn’t eradicated hunger, or poverty or disease or crime. It hasn’t brought us world peace and there is no indication that it ever will. And no, this is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of reality and sanity. The truth is we can’t save the planet. We can’t stop storms and hurricanes. We can’t abolish flooding or ban earthquakes. None of these things are in our gift. We can’t tell the sea to be still or the wind to be quiet. There was only one person who could do that and there is only one person who can.

And this gets to the nub of the problem, how can we
expect to protect the natural world and make it a place fit for human
flourishing, in harmony with the rest of creation, if we ignore the Creator and
lock him out of our discussions. The problem is not climate change denial; the
problem is God denial.